“What for?”
“For a positive, obviously.”
“I wish I was as confident as you about this whole thing,” I said.
I felt his eyes on me as I looked down.
“So…?”
“Well,” I said. “One line is negative. Two is positive. The problem is, I can see like five lines now. I don’t have my contacts in.”
“Jesus, Jen, you’re killing me! Give me that thing!”
He grabbed the test and stared at it, not saying anything for a few seconds. Only when I bugged him did he look me straight in the eyes and say, “Looks like we’re going to have to make a trip to the baby store, Michelle.”
25
New Stages
“No way.”
“But…”
“Did you not hear me?” I asked. “N. O. That spellsno.”
“You’re so boring.”
I looked closely at the sheets he was showing me—the famousKill Billsheets he’d brought up before—with their illustrations of swords and blood and people in black-and-yellow suits. I shook my head and kept pacing through the bedding aisle.
“I’m not sleeping with those,” I told him.
“Not even if this comes with it?” He waved a hand from his chest to his abdominals.
“Not even,” I said, reminding him that we’d made an agreement: every choice we made there that day we had to both agree on. Mike, shuffling behind us and eating an ice cream, butted in: “Can I add something?”
“No,” Jack responded.
We stopped in the aisle and looked back at him. I hadn’t been wild about the idea of having him act as our personal decor consultant, but that was Mike—you just couldn’t get rid of him. Snubbed, he skipped off ahead of us, amused at his brother’s annoyance. I took Jack’s arm, tryingto be grateful that I’d even gotten him out the door. Shopping had never been his thing, and he was even more wary now that he was starting to get recognized in public. Already, two people had noticed him, and one had snapped a photo.
He grumbled again, and I reminded him that he was the one who had insisted on getting new furniture.
“I was young and innocent!” he protested. “I had no idea what the consequences would be.”
“Well, you’ve got to deal with them now. And that means going to the baby section.”
I was surprised that remark got a smile out of him. But then, I’d been surprised at how happy he had been ever since we found out I was pregnant. I mean, I was, too, but I was terrified as well. I wasn’t sure I was responsible enough to bring another life into this world, and didn’t know how I’d handle such a big change. It was exciting, but when I really thought about it, I could feel the ground sink beneath my feet. So I tried to take it one step at a time. And that meant shopping. Not that we needed much: Will and Naya had given us Jane’s old things. The hip carrier, the Montessori mirror, the nasal aspirator…half this stuff I had never even heard of, but apparently you had to have it all now—that’s what I’d learned from all the Facebook and Instagram accounts about modern parenting Naya had shown me.
“Jack, what the hell are you doing with all those frames?” I asked, emerging from my trance.
“Baby photos…that’s a thing, right? Don’t tell me we’re not going to take a bunch of photos of our kid?”
I smiled, but then I saw that one of them had a stock photo of two grandparents cradling a child, and that reminded me of an issue I hadn’t intended to bring up yet. But Jack could read me like a book, so there was no point in hiding it. “Listen, I wanted to ask you something,” I said. “I know we haven’t talked about it yet, but…”
“No,” he said softly. “I’m not telling him anything.”
I knew whohimwas. Jack’s father, of course. We hadn’t talked about him in forever. Why would we? He was a mean old man, and he’d never done much for either of us. But things had changed. We were getting married and having a kid. Were we really going to shut him out forever? I knew I couldn’t force Jack to reconcile with his father, and I didn’t even want to. But I needed him to know that the option was open.
“Whatever you want to do, I support you one hundred percent,” I said gently. “I don’t care if you tell him about the kid, I don’t care if he doesn’t come to the wedding, it’s your call. I just want you to know that if you ever do decide to tell him, I’m OK with it.”
